Energy and Environment

Where not long ago the main focus of machine design and development was on keywords like „productivity“ and “accuracy” now subjects like “environment-friendliness” and “energy-saving measures” have gained more and more importance.

In this context environment protection does not necessarily go along with additional cost and effort but offers economic potential in energy- and resource consumption during production, handling and waste disposal and contributes to plant economy.

Growing product variety, shorter product life cycles and highly fluctuating batch sizes do not only change the design of new machine tools but also their

temporal utilisation. Outdated production facilities based on the linear- and dial table principle are highly productive due to their special concepts. A reuse after product change however is hardly possible which enormously increases resource consumption at constantly shortened innovation times. Present methods of resolution based on fully flexible manufacturing systems have already replaced this kind of machine concept in many industrial fields. But in every case they do not present the optimum: low production capacities, high cycle times, cost-intensive acquisition and high energy consumption provide standard performance in many cases.

A realised practical example clarifies this connection: For the synchronistic manufacture of two tandem pump housings a fully flexible solution requires five manufacturing systems; the production on production modules however reduced the number of machines to be acquired to two.

Meanwhile our customer introduced eight production modules in his plant, replacing 20 fictitious machines based on the machining centre principle.

Material, energy, operating- and auxiliary material, emissions and last but not least hall floor space for twelve machines in total were quantified.

Besides an economisation of resources and energy due to a reduced machinery the performance of production modules offers four further advantages: according to our motto “Non-existent features cannot break or cause expenses.” a production module in the production process requires:

• no tool changer
• no tool magazine
• no complex steel covers
• no chain of power
• no limit switches
• no acceleration/deceleration in the technological threshold

Especially the last point “acceleration/deceleration” is a reason for high energy consumption in conventional machining centres. Due to tool change a spindle deceleration from highest speed within shortest time and an equally high acceleration from 0 to the machining speed are necessary.

To control such high energy application high-capacity cooling aggregates are required in addition, causing higher energy consumption themselves.

The Production Module works totally different: Due to the fact that every tool has its own spindle, tool change is completely avoided offering the following advantages:

• optimal layout of the spindle size for the respective tool
• optimal layout for the machining process
• no high acceleration/deceleration required due to anticipatory spindle drive management.

This results in high durability and lowest possible energy input.

All in all we must stress that we know of no other machining system at this present time which converts energy into utility more efficiently than our Production Module.